Representations of madness in Indo-Caribbean literature

This thesis presents a critical reading of selected Indo-Caribbean prose and poetry and explores their shared concern with issues of madness and insanity. Before approaching literary texts, however, the thesis investigates the colonial treatment of mental illness in Trinidad and British Guiana in order to establish a pragmatic link between the East Indians’ experience of mental illness during indentureship and its later emergence in literature. The study of the development of local colonial psychiatry is based on the examination of original sources, including relevant Parliamentary Papers and previously unexamined material. A critical reading of Edward Jenkins’s writings provides the link between history and literature, whilst contemporary theories on the construction of the collective imaginary help to sustain the argument of a transference of the trope of madness from facts to fiction, from reality to imagination. This project contributes both to the growing field of Indo-Caribbean literary criticism and to the embryonic area of the history of mental health in the Caribbean. Concentrating on the relation between the social history of medicine and literary imagination it suggests a new approach to Indo-Caribbean literature based on the close relationship between health and culture

Des poissons aux masses d'eau : les usages militants du droit pour faire entendre la parole d'êtres qui ne parlent pas

Cet article relate les efforts entrepris par l'association ANPER-TOS depuis 1958 pour dénoncer et faire réprimer les pollutions aquatiques. Il montre comment certains pêcheurs, aidés par des juristes, sont devenus les porte-parole d'entités non-humaines jusque-là exclues de la représentation. Il pose le problème de leur prise en charge politique étant donné leurs singularités et les médiations techniques souvent lourdes qu'elles requièrent avant de pouvoir être entendues. L'article évoque plus particulièrement une affaire de porcherie industrielle survenue en Lozère qui pose la question de la matérialité et des êtres à prendre en compte pour la composition des mondes ruraux communs. / This articles account for the efforts made by ANPER-TOS (NGO) since 1958 to blow the whistle and get water pollution acts santioned. It shows how some fishermen, helped by legal professionals, became the spoke-persons for non-human entities which were until then excluded from representation. It discusses the problem of their political acknowledgement and management considering their singularities and the highly technical mediations they need to be heard. The article evokes particularly a trial concerning a pig factory farming located in Lozère, in France, and questions the materiality and entities that should be taken into account in the making of common rural worlds

Police Officers’ Perceptions of Body-Worn Cameras in the Buffalo and Rochester Police Departments

Police body-worn cameras have been advanced as a solution to disparate perceptions among the citizenry, public officials, community leaders, and the police themselves in the highly contested arena of police-citizen encounters. However, as with previous technological innovations in policing, it is important that the police themselves are comfortable with the technology. This is a report of a survey conducted on police officers’ perceptions of body-worn cameras in Buffalo and Rochester police departments, which uses a survey instrument administered with the Los Angeles Police Department. This study found similar attitudes toward body cameras not only among Buffalo and Rochester police officers, but also with Los Angeles. Recommendations include using the Bureau of Justice National Toolkit when considering a body-worn camera program, which addresses many of the concerns police officers expressed in this study

Symptoms of depression: \u201chot\u201d and \u201ccold\u201d cognition

Objectives: The central role of cognitive deficits in depression is well estab- lished and represents a primary mediator of the negative consequences of this disorder in both human and economic terms. The aim of the present review is to provide an up-to-date overview of current knowledge on the cognitive aspects of depression with particular focus on their clinical-therapeutic role. Materials and methods: English language and peer-reviewed publications were obtained by searching PubMed/Medline database using the keywords \u201cdepression\u201d or \u201cdepressive\u201d paired with \u201ccognition\u201d, \u201ccognitive\u201d, \u201ccold\u201d, \u201chot\u201d, \u201cdeficit\u201d, and \u201cexecutive function\u201d. Results: Recent studies have identified different cognitive systems that, when dysfunctional, play a crucial role in the onset and maintenance of depression: cognitive functions that are independent of emotional state (\u201ccold\u201d cognition) and cognitive regulation of emotional states (\u201chot\u201d cognition). These systems develop an interaction between cognition and affectivity termed \u201caffective cog- nition\u201d, which is frequently dysfunctional in individuals with depression. Conclusions: cognitive symptoms are increasingly the focus of clinical and scientific debate on depression, not only for their diagnostic utility, but also for their importance in the prognosis, therapy and rehabilitation of this disorder

Hiding mobile traffic fingerprints with GLOVE

Proceeding of: 11th ACM Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies ACM (CoNEXT 2015), Heidelberg, Germany, 1-4 December 2015Preservation of user privacy is paramount in the publication of datasets that contain fine-grained information about individuals. The problem is especially critical in the case of mobile traffic datasets collected by cellular operators, as they feature high subscriber trajectory uniqueness and they are resistant to anonymization through spatiotemporal generalization. In this work, we first unveil the reasons behind such undesirable features of mobile traffic datasets, by leveraging an original measure of the anonymizability of users' mobile fingerprints. Building on such findings, we propose GLOVE, an algorithm that grants k-anonymity of trajectories through specialized generalization. We evaluate our methodology on two nationwide mobile traffic datasets, and show that it achieves k-anonymity while preserving a substantial level of accuracy in the data.This work was supported by the French National Research Agency under grant ANR-13-INFR-0005 ABCD and by the EU FP7 ERA-NET program under grant CHIST-ERA-2012 MACACO

On the level of detail of synthetic highway traffic necessary to vehicular networking studies

Proceeding of: 2015 IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC), Kyoto, Japan, 16-18 December, 2015The proper modeling of road traffic is paramount to the dependability of studies on vehicular networking solutions intended for highway environments. Yet, it is not clear which is the actual level of detail in the mobility representation that is sufficient and necessary to such studies. This uncertainty results into a variety of approaches being adopted in the literature, and ultimately undermines the reliability and reproducibility of research outcomes. We explore the space of possible mobility models and performance metrics, and pinpoint the level of detail needed for different types of vehicular networking studies.The research leading to these results was carried out while Marco Gramaglia was at CNR-IEIIT, and has received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under REA grant agreement n.630211 ReFleX.Publicad

L’eau : un bien commun à composer

"S’il est un domaine où les praticiens, les acteurs de terrain ont su inventer des cosmopolitiques avant l’heure, c’est bien celui de l’eau. Il ne faudra jamais oublier comment, avec les mouvements liés aux parcs naturels, les associations de pêcheurs ont constitué très tôt des espaces de débat et d’inventions pour préserver la ressource puis le milieu naturel dans son ensemble. Dès qu’ils eurent placé ce souci avant leurs exigences de performance de pêche, ils durent rassembler et se confronter à toute la chaîne des acteurs qui compose ces chevelus que sont les problèmes de l’eau. Malgré la radicalité des propos ou des actions, la capacité à faire des alliances, à convaincre, est restée un souci constant. Souvent, les tribunaux furent leurs seuls espaces de controverses ouverts. Les manifestations n’ont pas manqué non plus. Et cette mobilisation à la fois forte, régulière et capable pourtant de composer avec les parties prenantes du milieu des rivières fait une différence avec la plupart des mobilisations environnementales. On se prend à rêver que les qualités de ces pêcheurs-là devenus protecteurs de leurs milieux au sens large, puissent un jour se retrouver aussi vraiment dans le milieu de la pêche professionnelle en mer, qui ne sait plus comment se sortir de la course à la destruction de la ressource qu’elle a mise en place.

Alexithymia and Treatment Outcome in Anorexia Nervosa: A Scoping Review of the Literature

Alexithymia is of great interest as an outcome predictor of recovery from anorexia nervosa, since it may interfere with both treatment compliance and patients' ability to benefit from the adopted interventions. Using the PRISMA methodology, we performed a scoping review of the literature about treatment outcome in anorexia nervosa, in terms of changes in alexithymia as assessed by its most commonly used self-report measure, the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS). The Medline and Scopus databases were searched, and articles were included if matching the following criteria: dealing with patients affected by anorexia nervosa, without limits of age; involving the application of any kind of targeted therapy or treatment; assessing alexithymia and the effect of a treatment intervention on alexithymia, using the TAS. Ten studies were eventually included; overall, according to the selected studies, alexithymia levels often remain high even after specific treatment. Further research aimed at a deeper understanding of the actual impact of alexithymia on the outcome of anorexia, as well as exploring alternative treatment strategies for alexithymia in eating disorders (EDs), are warranted